Adrian Tomine’s New Yorker Cover

Nov 02, 2012

“Where I was in Brooklyn, I don’t think I would have even known that there was a major storm happening,” says Adrian Tomine, the artist of next week’s cover, “Undeterred.” He continues:

So I spent the whole night glued to the Internet and watching everything unfolding, just being shocked that this kind of dramatic destruction was happening just miles outside my home. And I started thinking about how it would affect the election. This is a first for me in terms of doing [a cover] that’s topical with a quick turnaround; and somehow, these two significant events just came together into that one image for me.

Tomine adds:

For all its really horrible effects, I feel like the storm has made real a lot of issues in the election that were hypothetical, that were thrown around as debate topics—global warming; and “Is Obama enough of a leader to handle a natural disaster?”; and do we need FEMA? It’s really interesting, and in a way useful, to see a lot of these things become actual issues that are right at hand.